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Reframe: Santa Monica City Hall Murals (2022-2024)

In 2023, I began working with Metzli projects (including the amazing team: Joel Garcia, Robin Garcia, and Susannah Laramee Kidd) on a public process for Santa Monica's Reframe Initiative. The project revolved around the controversial mural in Santa Monica’s City Hall lobby – depicting imagined historical events in the History of the Santa Monica Bay. Our project involved public education, trauma informed public mediation, and a “citizen assembly” style process designed to create healing and positive resolution to a controversy that had led to a very public and frustrating deadlock in City Hall between those who sought to remove the mural and those who sought to keep it in place. The end product was a set of recommendations (unanimously approved by Santa Monica’s City Council) and a sourcebook of ideas for ways to move forward and respond to the mural.

The project involved public conversations – held over zoom and in-person, walking tours of sites of memory, public talks by historians, culture bearers, archeologists, and artists, as well as numerous town halls, and qualitative surveys. A central component was a group of people connected to Santa Monica and the mural who agreed to meet together over the course of a year and form a set of recommendations together. This “learning circle” modeled on civic assemblies and indigenous healing circles - included extremely diverse perspectives and voices, from descendents of people depicted in the mural to conservationists, youth, city workers, and community organizers. The recommendations that emerged from the process were adopted unanimously by the City Council - including the creation of new artwork of equal scale from other viewpoints, the creation of interpretive panels that condemned white supremacy, and a full audit of native representation in City Council governance.

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